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Two Polygon, Fantom Front Ends Hit by DNS Attack

Two gateways provided by Ankr were exploited on Friday, but Polygon said there are no indications any funds were lost.

By Shaurya Malwa
Updated May 11, 2023, 6:42 p.m. Published Jul 1, 2022, 1:36 p.m. 1 min read
Two RPC interfaces for Polygon and Fantom were impacted in a DNS hijack attack. (Mika Baumeister/Unsplash)
Two RPC interfaces for Polygon and Fantom were impacted in a DNS hijack attack. (Mika Baumeister/Unsplash)

Two remote procedure call (RPC) interfaces for the Polygon and Fantom blockchains were impacted in a domain name system (DNS) hijack attack on Friday, developers said.

RPC refers to a set of protocols that allow a client, such as MetaMask, to interact with a blockchain. DNS hijacking, on the other hand, is a type of cyber attack in which queries are manipulated in order to redirect users to malicious sites.

“Public RPC gateway provided by Ankr for Polygon (https://polygon-rpc.com) and Fantom (https://rpc.ftm.tools) were comprised via DNS hijack earlier today,” tweeted Mudit Gupta, Polygon's chief information security officer. “Use Alchemy or others while this is fixed.”

Gupta told CoinDesk in a Twitter direct message that the attack was a “middleware exploit.” He added: “No funds lost as far as we know but we are still investigating.”

Gupta added that decentralized applications (dapps) that used the RPC endpoint are currently unavailable. Meanwhile, at writing time, Gupta noted that Web3 infrastructure platform Ankr had regained access to its RPC accounts.

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